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McEnroe’s Courtly Behavior

June 22, 2011

Thirty years ago today, two Americans faced off in a second-round match at Wimbledon. One was Tom Gullikson, a dominant force in doubles (with his identical twin brother Tim) and a decent singles player in his own right. The other was a twenty-two-year-old New Yorker named John McEnroe, who would go on to defeat Bjorn Borg and capture his first Wimbledon title, avenging his epic loss of the previous year. During the match, a call did not go McEnroe’s way, and he began to berate the umpire, Edward James. “You can’t be serious, man,” he said. He elaborated: “You cannot be serious!” His argument, that the ball was in because chalk flew up from the line, has been lost to history. The outburst, on the other hand, has been enshrined in it.

That was not the only McEnroe meltdown. It was not his first or his last or his most violent. But it has become his most iconic. “You Cannot Be Serious” became the title of his memoir, and the phrase has surfaced in a variety of contexts, mostly comic; he reused it when he appeared as a guest star on “30 Rock.” But today, on the anniversary of the original offense, I would like to propose a more auspicious use for it. At the time, I was watching the match. I was eleven, a fan of tennis but a bigger fan of anger. It was tremendously cathartic to march around the house for a few days saying, “You cannot be serious” to anything I was told. It’s time for dinner? You cannot be serious! I have to clean my room? You cannot be serious! But there’s a broader application. McEnroe, as the recent HBO documentary “McEnroe/Borg: Fire & Ice” explained, shocked England precisely because he was a stereotypical Ugly American: brash, arrogant, indecorous. But he was also importantly American for other reasons. He was brilliant but callow, like the nation sometimes was. And he was constitutionally unable to hold his tongue. A Stamp Act? You cannot be serious! That’s why I would like to propose that June 22nd become, for now and forever, You Cannot Be Serious Day. Use the phrase liberally every year, for one day: with your spouse, with your boss, in the car, even to yourself (you could make an argument, in fact, that most of McEnroe’s tantrums were actually self-directed). I have already started a grassroots (or is it grasscourt?) campaign on Twitter, but I would like to reiterate it right here, right now. Seriously.